


Like the Sky, Like the Sea

by redjacket



Category: Wonder Woman (2017)
Genre: F/M, Soulmate-Identifying Marks
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-08-06
Updated: 2018-08-06
Packaged: 2019-06-22 14:58:44
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,776
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15584475
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/redjacket/pseuds/redjacket
Summary: For all that he seemed to be surrounded by people with them, the idea of soulmarks never enamoured Steve the way they did most people. He was as much a practical man as he was a dreamer and there were a lot of people in the world. Meeting your soulmate was rarer than people liked to think.





	Like the Sky, Like the Sea

**Author's Note:**

> Written for the second prompt of the [Wondertrev love week: soulmate/soulmark!](https://wondertrevnet.tumblr.com/post/175651939595/wondertrev-love-week-2018-4-11-august)

Charlie’s soulmark was on the palm of his hand and surprisingly disquieting for such a common spot because of the colours, murky blue and purple, like a bruise. 

Charlie never spoke of his of his wife.

Sameer’s was smeared across his lips, but daintily, as if the kisser had been shy, a faint blush of pink and red that could be missed in the right light. 

Sameer laughed when asked about it and never told the same tale twice. Steve said nothing about his lack of wedding ring.

Chief’s had never said anything about his and, if he had one, it wasn’t plainly visible. Steve hadn’t asked, it wasn’t entirely polite to ask, even though it wasn’t particularly unusual  _ not _ to have a soulmark. But there were things he said sometimes, that made Steve think Chief was just private about it. 

(There had been a few moments when Steve thought  — hoped — Chief might be like him. 

Steve didn’t have a soulmark.) 

Etta’s was a mystery for the longest time. Steve thought, at first, she  _ must _ not have one. 

But one night, when they left the office very late, Steve had insisted on escorting her home. It would have been better for Etta if he hadn’t  — a German spy had been waiting to ambush him. He only had a knife, not a gun, thank god, and Steve dispatched him easily enough, but not before he made a wild swing that slashed Etta’s dress in the shoulder. 

They were closest to Etta’s apartment then. Steve had rushed her there, startling her roommate badly when he hastily pushed inside. Etta was fine, mostly protesting about how fine she was and telling her friend  — who had a hand over her heart and her mouth and looked considerably less fine  — about the one good jab she had gotten in before Steve dealt with the “highwayman” who had “accosted” them.

Etta said it loudly, the underlying message being that her roommate did not know exactly what Etta’s warwork entailed. 

Steve had gone to get them all a brandy  — on Etta’s stern instruction. By that point, he was rather bemused about the whole thing. He had paused in the doorway coming back, he wasn’t sure why, and glanced up. 

Etta’s friend was inspecting Etta’s shoulder through the tear in the dress. Etta was unhurt but...even from a distance, the bright pink, yellow and green mark was unmistakable. And a perfect match to the roommates fingers. 

Steve took two steps back, pretended to trip and cursed loudly in the hallway, before walking into the sitting room. 

He knew by Etta’s expression that he hadn’t fooled her for a moment but her... _ friend  _ was standing back, blushing. 

Steve made his excuses to leave quickly, after. 

(He made several, overly casual remarks about Boston marriages and his sister’s best friend over the next few days. Etta never said anything but Steve did get an invitation to tea, one weekend, and a proper introduction to Edith.) 

For all that he seemed to be surrounded by people with them, the idea of soulmarks never enamoured Steve the way they did most people. The calculating side of him that served him so well in spycraft clashed with the side that had lead him into an airplane to chase the edge of the sky. He was as much a practical man as he was a dreamer and there were a lot of people in the world. Meeting your soulmate was rarer than people liked to think. 

Besides, Steve had never found an example of love better than his parents, and they weren’t soulmates. There was something both romantic and comforting in that, the idea that soulmarks were not the be all and end all of love. 

(His father had never found his soulmate, never gotten a soulmark, and never seemed much bothered by it. 

His mother had a patch of black on the crook of her elbow. The boy who had given it to her had had died of polio when he was twelve and she was eleven.

The mark, she told Steve once, had been blue, like his eyes.) 

Still, Steve wouldn’t lie and say he hadn’t occasionally thought about what it would be like. The colours that might streak across his skin the first time his soulmate touched him, if the colours that bloomed over hers would be the same or complimentary or even a complete contrast. 

The war had ended those faint daydreams the same way it had sucked the joy from everything else, even flying. Steve had buried those parts of himself so deeply he thought they hadn’t survived the mud and terror of the trenches, let alone all the things he had done as a spy.

There wasn’t room for anything but his dogged pursuit of the war’s end.

(And the relentless fear that it would  _ never  _ end.)

It wasn’t until after  — after crashing and nearly drowning and being saved and bringing death and destruction to a place that hadn’t seen it in god knew how long and the interrogation and then being taken away to what he had thought would be prison and turned out to be a healer  — that he realized what had happened. 

The healer had been adamant about him using the...weird, glowing pools they had.  _ Really  _ adamant. He hadn’t thought his general hygiene was  _ that  _ bad, despite how long he had been in that German flight suit, but he wasn’t about to turn down a bath. 

He stripped off his shirt, intent on doing just that and stopped. Stared.

The mark was unavoidable. From what he could see, it stretched from his shoulder down his chest and ended in a handprint just above his stomach. He craned his neck to try to look at his back. It extended there too, he couldn’t tell how far down. He reached back automatically to touch the skin on the back of his shoulder, as if he could tell from touch alone. 

The soulmark was a riot of colour  — he didn’t think he had ever seen one like it. The colours were more nuanced, somehow, than most, but still bold. 

Steve couldn’t identify all of them, he wasn’t sure where he would even start, but it reminded him of fire, the kind that burned so hot it went blue around the edges. 

Steve didn’t know how to react. He had never asked anyone but he had been sure...he would have felt something, surely? 

He put his hand flat over the mark where it ended in a clear-as-day handprint. It must have been when he was drowning. When he was unconscious. 

That was the only time someone had touched him this much since before he left London.

There was only one person it could be. 

(Steve was startled when she  — Diana  — came to find him. But he wasn’t surprised. He wouldn’t have been even if her mark wasn’t particularly a supernova on his body. He would have guessed from her expression during his trial and the way she had stormed after her mother. 

And the way she reacted to her aunt’s death. 

He waited for her to say something about the mark. She had to know. Didn’t she?

She said nothing. Steve thought she might have glanced at it but she was more interested in his watch.

Steve dressed hastily, after that. When she left, he rubbed the back of his neck. There was still a glimpse of colour visible under his shirt. He buttoned it higher, rubbed his hand over his face and fished out his silk map and compass.

He had work to do. He didn’t have time to wonder if he had even left a trace on her.)

—

Amazons did not have soulmarks in the way men did. Theirs were less visible, if they were visible at all, but they were felt much more deeply. 

Diana had heard stories of the soulmarks of men, of course. Many scoffed at them  — they were all show, some Amazons said, no feeling. They formed on men the first time they touched their soulmate as well, unlike Amazons, for whom such things might be established in the first or tenth or hundredth touch. And where Amazons might have several  — bonding the whole community together with overlapping marks of various bonds  — men rarely had more than one and they often guarded them jealousy. 

Or so Diana was told. 

(She had not expected the riot of colour on Steve Trevor’s chest. It would be rude to stare at it though, given what Diana knew of men and their solitary soulmarks.) 

It had been a shock when she had taken off her gauntlets to change into the armour she found with the godkiller and found a mark on her wrist, unlike any Amazon’s soulmark. 

It was blue but to describe it so did it an injustice. It was many shades of blue and though it was a static, unmoving mark, it seemed to shift in depth and vibrancy, like the sea. Or the sky. 

(Steve Trevor, she would think later, had come to her out of the sky and she had plucked him from the sea.) 

It was where Steve had grabbed her in his attempt to pull her to safety when the Germans appeared on the beach. The first touch between them, Diana realized, that he had initiated instead of her. 

She strapped her gauntlets on again. She went and took Steve from the caves as she had planned. Ares has to be her first priority.

That was her mission.

(She wanted desperately to speak to her mother about the mark but there was no time, not when Hippolyta was handing her Antiope’s legacy and challenging her to be worthy of it.) 

—

They didn’t speak of it until Veld. 

They hardly spoke of it then. 

Steve kissed Diana and she kissed him back, kissed him again and again. They tore each other’s clothing off. They had been touching nearly constantly, reaching out for each other unconsciously, and now that they came to it, they couldn’t bear another moment of not being skin to skin. 

Diana had not seen Steve’s mark since the night on Themyscira. She trailed her fingers over it.

Steve had not seen Diana’s at all. His mouth went slack when he first saw it and then he kissed her wrist reverently.

“Do you have soulmarks on Paradise Island?” Steve asked, quietly. He looked at her as if he was not sure what he wanted the answer to be. “Do you know what it means?”

“It seems there are some differences between soulmates on Themyscira and those here,” Diana’s said. There was no mistaking the way Steve’s breath hitched when she said soulmates or the desire that burned in his eyes. “But I understand what it means.”

Steve kissed her again and then again and then again.

They barely made it to the bed, consumed by the need to  _ touch  _ each other. Diana tangled her fingers in Steve’s hair, the blue of her soulmark shimmering from the sweat that beaded off his temple. Steve made an incoherently pleased noise when Diana’s other hand covered the soulmark on his shoulder, pulling him closer even as he surged forward and kissed her again, as if it were what his mouth was created for.

The way they had been meant for each other. 

(Steve would think of that, unable to stop himself, when Diana walked out of the gas cloud, full of rage and despair. And on the watchtower, when she learned just how dark the souls of men could be. 

Death blackened a soulmark, Steve knew. He had grown up seeing one carried on his mother’s arm. 

He wondered if heartbreak could too. If hatred could. 

He wondered if it would darken his or hers. He knew he was lost, that he would never stop loving her. If she did, would it be the mark of her touch or his that went black. 

Or could only death do that?

He never had the chance to check.)

—

Diana did not know if her mark ached as she watched Steve’s plane explore so far beyond her reach. Anger and sorrow and pain fuelled her.. 

It consumed her wholly. 

She did not think of her soulmark until well after the battle, until they had left the airfield and Sameer had found them an abandoned farmhouse to stay in. It only had two rooms, a bedroom and a common space. They all insisted she take the bedroom alone. 

Diana knew they did not know what to say. Whether or not they had guessed that she and Steve were soulmates, they knew they had made claims to each other. 

She undressed more slowly than she had after even the worst days of Antiope’s training. The remembrance of Steve’s love was a balm but the ache in her heart at his loss still radiated throughout her body. 

She took the gauntlets off last. Death, she knew, blackened men’s soulmarks. It numbed the soulmarks of Amazon’s, though it had been a millennia since that had occurred, before their most recent losses. 

Diana did not know what happened to the marks of gods. She wished she did not have to find out. 

The thought of leaving her gauntlets on forever did occur to her. 

But she did not. She closed her eyes. She did not open them as she took one off and then the other. 

She took a breath and opened her eyes.

The very middle of her soulmark was black, as if burnt, but the rest was not. It was  _ changed _ . Still a million shades of blue but it was if it had exploded outward, over her forearm.

Diana stared.

It was if something flying away had been yanked back to earth. As if someone who died had been brought back to life. 

Diana strode into the other room. 

Charlie yelped, his feet coming down off the battered table and landing heavily on the floor. Sameer stared, swallowed, but then averted his eyes and grabbed his discarded coat up, holding it up and bringing it to her. 

Diana was not interested in that or man’s preoccupation with forcing women into excessive amounts of clothing. She looked to Napi, whom she had seen for what he was from the start. 

She held out her arm. “What does it mean?”

Napi did a double take before gingerly reaching for her wrist. His fingers were gentle as the brushed over where the mark had turned back, the new pattern that exploded outward, like shooting stars. 

Then he smiled, relief and new worry replacing his sorrow. His fingers curled over her wrist.

“We have to find him,” Napi said. “Quickly.”

—

The hospital was noisier than it ought to be. The war was coming to an end but it was not over yet. The wounded and the dying still arrived in terrible numbers. 

(Men would die until the very last minute of the war.)

In the corner of one of the wards, there was an odd sight. A man who should have died, surrounded by three men, imposing or charming or cajoling by turn, who hovered protectively by his bedside despite the intercessions of the doctors. 

And a woman, who was most definitely not a nurse, sat by his side, holding his limp hand in both of hers.

Most strange of all, was his soulmark. It was unusual enough to have one as large as he did stretching across his chest, bared but for the bandages. But there was another mark against his cheek, the colours - shades of yellow and blue and red - soft against his skin, almost reverent. 

(They had found him in the centre of the remains of the plane. What little was left was sprawled and burning. Steve, though unconscious, had little more than superficial burns, cuts and a broken arm.

Diana had been unable to resist touching him. The first flutter of her fingers over his cheek had left a soft flush of colour behind.

His other soulmark, the first one she had left behind when pulling him from the wreckage of a downed plane, remained unchanged.) 

They stayed there all night, waiting. Eventually, one man fell asleep in a chair, another on the floor beside the cot, but the woman and the tall man standing at the foot of the bed did not waver. Not once. 

The man in the bed stirred just before dawn. His fingers curled against the back of her hand, leaving clumsy trails of colour behind, blue still. Like the sky. Like the sea. 

Like the eyes Steve was slowly opening to look at her blearily. 

Diana smiled. 

**Author's Note:**

> In case it wasn't clear, soulmarks appear the first time your soulmate touches you. Whoever is initiating the touch leaves the soulmark.


End file.
